This is my first post of 2010 and I have decided to make it a part of Amy Coffin of We Tree and Geneabloggers.com’s New Weekly Genealogy Blogging Challenge of 2010. Details of this year-long weekly challenge can be found at the Genea-bloggers facebook page. This year it is geared at helping genealogists hone in and brush up on their research skills.

This week’s challenge is to

Go to your local public library branch. Make a note of the genealogy books in the collection that may help you gain research knowledge. Don’t forget to check the shelves in both the non-fiction section and the reference section.

I like to do this periodically, however I usually employ the use of the Worldcat Library Catalog.

Last week I even took this challenge so far as to to visit the local library of the small town I was visiting over the holidays – Waynesboro, GA. Waynesboro is part of Burke County, Georgia. They have a brand new library with its very own Genealogy Room. There was not a special collections librarian on duty in the Genealogy Room that I saw, probably due to the holidays.

The Burke County library is part of a bigger library system emcompassing multiple counties – East Central Georgia Regional Library. Worldcat reports this larger library system as the holder of some of the titles I was looking for. I had to click on the location, then click on the holding’s title to find out exactly which library had this holding. Unfortunately, even though I found several titles of interest to me in the Burke County Library catalog, the actual books could not be located in the genealogy room where they were supposed to be held. The books are kept in locked cabinets, however it is not uncommon for books to be removed from the libraries by patrons who have family listed in them.

The books I was interested in were:
Early records of Georgia : Wilkes County by Grace Gillam Davidson
Some Georgia County Records volumes 1-10

The families I was researching in Wilkes County Georgia were the Binns and Anthony families who moved from Henrico and New Kent Counties Virginia to Wilkes and Jasper Counties, Georgia about 1792. The Binns family married into the Brooks family from North Carolina that is featured in this blog.